Posts

December 1, 2018 - 3 minutes

If you’ve ever been frustrated by formatting or design issues in Microsoft Word/Google Docs, welcome to the beauty that is LaTeX. Background I used LaTeX back in my college days for writing computer science papers, and after getting over the inital learning curve fell in love with it. Being able to programatically and logically lay out content just makes so much sense. But post-academia, I hadn’t found much use for LaTeX.
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November 11, 2018 - 5 minutes

Writing a Chrome Extension Or, How I Gamed My Favorite Subscription Box 💁 Like many millenials, I love subscription boxes. One particular seasonal box that I like is FabFitFun (FFF). They have special add-ons you can order with your quarterly box, but all the good ones sell out early. Their add-ons page is particularly annoying, as you have to scroll through many slow-loading pages to view all the products. Often, by the time I see a low-quantity item I want to add to my cart, it’s sold out by the time I can click on it.
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September 30, 2018 - 10 minutes

Table of contents Background Hosting Wordpress on AWS Static Site Generators Migrating from Wordpress to Hugo Customizing Your Hugo Site Deployment Custom Domain Name SSL Next Steps Background I’ve been running my personal site with Namecheap and Wordpress for the past 6 years. My site had a hand-coded static HTML and CSS site with standard pages like “about me”, and a subdomain which hosted my Wordpress blog.
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July 23, 2018 - 2 minutes

AdaBox #008 arrived this week, and the theme this time was…robots!
I loved building robots in college, so was excited to dive into this box.
The project I chose to start with was a self-driving robotic car that can detect when it’s bumped into things via an accelerometer in the circuit board, reverse, and change direction. Basically a roomba except it won’t vacuum the floor for you.
It does provide great entertainment for cats, though!
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April 7, 2018 - 2 minutes

Recently I subscribed to AdaBox, the subscription box from Adafruit that delivers a themed electronics kit every few months. It’s perfect for both people who are new to electronics, and those who aren’t but like the idea of getting relatively inexpensive materials for several fun pre-selected projects.
The box I just got was #007, which fittingly was spy-themed. You can see a couple pictures of the unboxing below; it also came with some hacker zines and a lockpicking set which was awesome.
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January 8, 2018 - 2 minutes

I did the Advent of Code in Golang last month and overall found it to be an excellent experience. The quality of the problems was good, although some days were too trivial, and it was a great learning experience for getting more familiar with a language – in my case, Go.
(I did about half of the advent before life happened, but you can check out the solutions to the first half here!
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December 1, 2017 - 1 minutes

As I announced on Twitter…
Doing the Advent of Code in #golang this year! You can follow my solutions on https://t.co/BoOKwwk1QC
— Amy Schlesener (@AmySchlesener) December 2, 2017 I’m doing the Advent of Code this year! It’s like an advent calendar, except you have to solve programming problems instead of getting chocolate. (Okay, so maybe a chocolate advent calendar in addition to the advent of code is in order).
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April 30, 2017 - 2 minutes

Technology communities fascinate me. How groups spring up around programming languages or frameworks, and how cultures form within those groups.
Picture the most recent tech meetup or conference you went to. What was it like? What kind of people were there? How did they make you feel?
I was using a particular framework and related language for several years. I liked the technology, but every related event I went to was kind of soul-sucking.
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May 16, 2016 - 2 minutes

Recently I went to a workshop on programming microcontrollers with Arduino, hosted by the awesome Stephanie Hurlburt. My expertise being more in software than hardware, I was super excited to try it out.
Turns out it’s pretty easy to get started building a basic circuit – assuming you already have the hardware (microcontroller, breadboard, resistors, USB wire, any LEDs and other doohickeys you may fancy), you just download the right USB driver for your microcontroller and get the Arduino IDE.
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April 29, 2016 - 4 minutes

Last month I had the opportunity to attend the Women Who Code CONNECT conference in Seattle. It was a two-day-long technical conference featuring a ton of awesome technical and career talks from inspiring women in tech, plus workshops and networking and all that good stuff.
All the speakers were fantastic. Some of the highlights for me were Maira Benjamin, Director of Engineer at Pandora, who shared some of the valuable lessons she learned during her 30 years as a woman in tech; Neha Batra from Pivotal Labs, who did a tech talk on pair programming that convinced me that I really want to try it; and Nandini Ramani, VP of Engineering at Twitter, who shared her compelling life story and lessons her grandmother in India taught her.
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